After Seeking Legal Counsel and Saying Hey to Tim Cook, Kushner Is off to Bang Out Peace in the Middle East

Jared Kushner gave a rare public speech at the inaugural meeting of the American Technology Council at the White House on June 19, 2017.

By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

“Our goal is simple,” Jared Kushner said on Monday afternoon, in a rare public speech at the White House, his gray suit and blue tie pristine, as usual. “We are here to improve the day-to-day lives of the average citizen. That's a core promise and we are keeping it.”

Kushner’s speech, which was delivered with quiet force, represented an apogee of his brief political career. After spending the past two weeks endeavoring upon the earnest, if underwhelming and overshadowed, “Infrastructure Week” and “Workforce Development Week”—traveling to Cincinnati with his father-in-law and boss to talk about the nation’s waterways; lending a hand to Veterans Affairs’s effort to update its electronic health records system—Kushner was finally prepared to unveil his much ballyhooed new themed week, “Tech Week,” starting with Monday’s “Tech summit.” Along with his team in the Office of American Innovation, he had put together a four-hour series of working sessions with some of the most successful executives in Silicon Valley. As Mike Allennoted in Axios, few people in the Valley share the Trump administration’s views on immigration or climate change, among other issues, but many executives appeared to believe that snubbing the event would look unpatriotic—or, perhaps worse, prompt an unfriendly tweet from the organizer’s father-in-law. As a result, Kushner could dip in and out of discussions with the likes of Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, Satya Nadella and more than a dozen other technology executives.

One senior White House official said that the Trump Administration thinks of itself as having 320 million customers—the American people—and this day was focused on finding ways for the private sector to make citizens’ interactions with government “five, 10, and in some cases, 50 or 100 percent better.” This is consistent with the Trump administration’s talking points on the matter. White House officials have repeatedly noted that these kinds of broad changes take time, and that President Donald Trump has given them the latitude to search for the best solutions, not just the fastest. “The problems we are looking at in the Office of American Innovation are not quick fixes,” Chris Ladell, an assistant to the president who works in the O.A.I., said on Friday. “These are things that are going to require years to really make significant progress on. And our systems are in some cases 10 to 20 years out of date, so we’re not going to fix that in one day. But we have to start now. And this day we believe will be a significant one in terms of generating ideas and potential solutions to some of the problems.”

The tech summit also provides Kushner an opportunity to counter-program a narrative quickly circling his role in the White House. In the meantime, Kushner is taking steps for what may come sooner. On Sunday, The New York Times reported that he had reached out to criminal lawyers about potentially representing him in the federal investigation into Russia’s alleged meddling in the presidential election. Kushner’s private attorney, Jamie Gorelick, worked at the same law firm as Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed to investigate the Trump campaign’s possible Russian ties, and Gorelick reportedly told Kushner to get the advice of an independent lawyer about whether he should keep her on as counsel.

According to the Times report, Kushner began to reach out out to other attorneys last month, after reports from The Washington Post revealed that investigators were looking into his meetings with Russian officials in December about setting up a secret communication channel between the Trump team and the Kremlin. Last week, the Post reported that investigators were also looking at Kushner’s business dealings. Kushner, the Times noted, has reached out to lawyers with more litigation experience, though Gorelick is preparing Kushner for a meeting with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. As of now, the meeting has yet to be officially scheduled.

The Tech Summit provides some temporary P.R. cover from the long tail of the Russia investigation. But this being Jared Kushner, whose hyperbolic West Wing portfolio includes everything from stemming the opioid crisis to modernizing government I.T., other opportunities abound. On Wednesday, Kushner will travel to the Middle East, where he will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas about their priorities and next steps in working toward peace in the region. Jason Greenblatt, the White House’s special representative for international negotiations, will travel to the region on Monday in advance of Kushner’s visit, and the two will meet together with leaders mid-week.

The trip comes just a month after Kushner visited Saudi Arabia and Israel with his father-in-law and boss, before he returned to the White House to launch “Infrastructure Week,” “Workforce Week,” and now, “Tech Week” out of his Office of American Innovation. As is the case with the changes his team is making to modernize government, a White House official emphasized that Kushner’s trip to Israel is a single step in a long line of steps that will need to take place in order to make progress.

“It is important to remember that forging a historic peace agreement will take time and to the extent that there is progress, there are likely to be many visits by both Mr. Kushner and Mr. Greenblatt, sometimes together and sometimes separately,” the official said in a statement.

Much has been said about the dizzying number of responsibilities Kushner has been tasked with juggling by his father-in-law: Besides forging Middle East peace and working with Silicon Valley leaders to bring best practices into the government, he is also nominally in charge of creating apprenticeship programs to fill the skills gap in the employment sector, pumping $1 trillion into Trump’s infrastructure overhaul, and serving as a liaison between world leaders and the West Wing. He also traveled to Iraq with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff earlier this year as a representative of the administration. It’s a broad slate that reflects not only President Trump’s trust in his son-in-law’s ability and loyalty, and perhaps, also, his distrust and lack of confidence in others in his administration. But it is also a smart strategy for Kushner. With so many balls in the air, it’s hard to keep track of where things stand, and all he needs to do is to keep one spinning in order to distract from the rest. The White House communications blitz on his agenda certainly helps reinforce that these issues take time, weeks and months and years, in some cases, to work through. The question, of course, is whether Trump's administration will be afforded the time its chief deputy needs.